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Kevin J. Smant, Michael Kimmage. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. (Harvard Historical Studies, number 165.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 419. $45.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 858–859, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.858-a
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This is an important, well-researched study of two important American intellectuals of the Cold War, Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers. Both of their journeys sparked a larger movement among the American intelligentsia—the turning away of both the Left and the Right from radicalism. Chambers, Michael Kimmage argues, aided the Right in pivoting away from isolationism and neo-Fascism, while Trilling purged the Left of Stalinism. Thus, both men encouraged a “conservative turn” away from disaster and toward support of the Cold War.
Kimmage does an excellent job of reintroducing today's historians to the intellectual era that spanned the 1920s through the height of the Cold War and beyond, a time of intellectual ferment and change during which many intellectuals' Depression-era romance with communism gave way to rejection of it in the decades to come. At the same time, he meticulously details the journeys of two deep thinkers, Trilling and Chambers. The two men had many similarities. Both were sons of bourgeois parents. They both attended Columbia University, and both of them were attracted to communism—Chambers became a Communist Party member and spy, while Trilling was more or less a fellow traveler. But each man eventually had his “Kronstadt” moment, his break with communism. While they dispersed to different sides of the political aisle, still both preached moderation to their new comrades. They gave their sides intellectual depth through the books they penned: Trilling in The Middle of the Journey (1947), Chambers through Witness (1952). Both accepted the notions of hierarchy and absolutes and defended Western civilization. They disliked Senator Joseph McCarthy, but they also disapproved of the antianticommunism of his critics. Finally, they both helped form an American anticommunist intelligentsia.
